


To Possess a Second Soul

by The_Apostrophe_of_Catastrophe



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Autoteles--wwvthemeweek day 3, Communication Skillz, Finding home, Fluff and Humor, Hasetsu, Japapnese is complicated, Languages are hard, Loneliness, M/M, Missing Moments, My language nerd is showing, Pre-Relationship, References to Depression, Summer of mutual pining, Victor is trying his best, You thought you were signing up for a short story, Yuuri is oblivious, grammar, language learning, until he isn't, when suddenly BOOM, you poor suckers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 05:23:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15357201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Apostrophe_of_Catastrophe/pseuds/The_Apostrophe_of_Catastrophe
Summary: Victor and Yuuri celebrate that night with a bowl of Katsudon, and he watches as Mari says something to Yuuri that makes him blush and smack her lightly on the arm.  That’s when it hits him:-I’ll stay here for as long as he’ll let me.This thought is followed immediately by:-I wish I understood him. Not just his words, but the emotions behind his eyes, the way his fingers tap out rhythms like a nervous melody.And then, a split second later:-Why didn’t I think to learn Japanese before now?





	To Possess a Second Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys! This was based off the prompt "Missing Moments" for wewritevictuuri's Autoteles week! I had a ton of fun with it, since it was a great opportunity to take my experiences from my own language learning journeys and apply it to a universe I love very dearly. I am a bit obsessed with languages and the learning processes that goes with them, and I'm afraid it shows here. 
> 
> Title comes from the quote "To have another language is to possess a second soul." Thank you, Charlemagne; I couldn't have said it better.

To Possess a Second Soul

Here’s a fact: Victor isn’t truly as impulsive as the media makes him out to be.

He does not, contrary to popular belief, purchase a place ticket the moment the cute skater from the banquet in Sochi fails to call him (although Victor knows for a fact that he gave him his number).  He finishes out his season, despite the twinge of disappointment he feels when he hears that Yuuri Katsuki would not be competing in Worlds.  But at heart, he’s bored and empty and so very _tired_.  So, when he sees Katsuki’s video that practically shouts to him “Come and find me, you’re not the only one who’s lost,” it’s an easy decision to call for his things to be packed up, get Makkachin checked by a vet, print and sign the documents that would get both him and his dog to Japan, and purchase a flight ticket (first class, of course).  Yakov is a father to him in all but blood, but even he hasn’t seen the darkness that has quietly crept into Victor’s mind these last few months. (Years, really, but Victor isn’t sure he’s ready to admit that to himself, so afraid of wasted years.) To an outsider, it seems random.  The truth holds more method than madness.

 

 

Here’s another fact: Victor is fluent in three languages.  His first language is Russian, obviously, and he likes it well enough.  It’s harsh perhaps, but not as harsh as German, and it feels rich and deep on his tongue, like a spoonful of warm honey or a swath of dark velvet. 

(Victor has never licked velvet, so he’s not sure on the last one, but it’s an eloquent analogy at least.) 

His second language is English.  He learns it out of necessity, at first; competitions are easier with it, and he can reach a wider audience through interviews once he starts taking his spreading popularity a little more seriously.  He is alright with Yakov seeing him as a ditz at times, but Victor likes to do things properly, and he certainly hates being seen as full-on stupid or even less-than-perfect once he’s put his mind to something.  So he learns English because he has to, but he finds that now that he’s started, he can’t stop.  The English alphabet has fewer letters (though in certain combinations they made the oddest sounds, with so many absurd exceptions), and their conjugations are strange (honestly, their verbs don’t even have cases, how is anyone supposed to know what person and thing are doing what?) but English is _fun_ , playful in a way that Russian isn’t.  There is so much media to enjoy with English too; more TV shows, more books, more movies, more documentaries (to Victor’s delight—the Russian film industry was, in his opinion, sorely lacking in really high quality documentaries compared to this new treasure trove of visual knowledge).   He likes learning it, so he studies grammar books, fills notebooks with rules and vocabulary memory tricks, and consumes novels and movies and music and everything he can get his hands on.  He is fluent enough to hold a conversation that goes deeper than the weather and food within 8 months of studying.  He feels comfortable with passive and active voice within the year, and he graduates from simple chapter books to full novels within two and a half years.  He feels as proud as he had the first time he’d stood at the top of a podium when he realizes he can understand more than 70% of the songs on his English music playlist. (It consists of artists ranging from Lady Gaga to Britney Spears to Avril Lavigne, to Yakov’s blatant horror.)

He was seventeen at the time. 

He takes up French not long after he feels comfortable he won’t mix up their grammatical rules with English’s grammar.  He has only heard it in his mandatory ballet classes and from his travels, but he likes the lushness of the words.  They sound graceful when spoken fluently, though he wonders at first if he will ever get the accent right; Russian is spoken in the back of the mouth, like the tongue is afraid to touch the soft palate.  French is spoken like a kiss, everything close to the lips (with the exception of those bloody ‘rrrs’).  It deserves to be called the language of love; the lightness of the syllables sound like airy spring days and strawberry Champaign, and the long vowels feel like a lover’s sigh. 

He likes learning French, likes learning in general, really.  It staves off the boredom on long nights during his off-seasons, gives him something to feel like he’s still improving at something after practices when he wonders if he is permanently cursed to remain on a plateau when it comes to skating—never getting better, becoming _more_ , even if he isn’t necessarily falling behind. 

 

Perhaps the final fact you need to know in order to understand Victor’s current predicament is this: for all of his practice at acquiring languages, and for all that he actually did think about his actions before he committed them, Yuuri’s native tongue is proving as difficult to grasp as the man himself.  Victor has never lived outside of Russia.  Traveled, yes, and extensively, but always with a friend or a tour guide or Yakov, and it’s nearly always been in countries where he could at least read the alphabet.  He has visited Japan before, but Victor soon realizes there is a difference between visiting a place and actually _living_ there. 

Yuuri speaks excellent English, but the first week or so he seems reluctant—at best—to speak to Victor about anything deeper than the weather or training, and even that is with stuttering sentences and almost frightened glances.  Victor hadn’t expected that, so he seeks out other people to distract him from the loneliness that comes from being a solitary traveler in a foreign country. 

This loneliness is different from the one he fought off constantly in St. Petersburg, though; here, he is less physically alone than he was at home.  (It’s been a while since he really felt like St. Petersburg was home, if he’s truthful though.)  Here, at least, he is surrounded by activity at any given moment. 

Yuuri’s sister Mari is also competent in English, not to the same extent as her brother, but enough to chuckle at his questions and answer them until his curiosity is satisfied.  She’s funny too, with a quick, dry humor that is only occasionally lost in translation. 

Yuuri’s father knows a bit of English, and Victor enjoys exchanging daily pleasantries with him.  He’s jovial, and Victor can’t stop the smile that breaks over his face at Toshiya’s genuine enthusiasm.  Hiroko is a bit more fluent than her husband, and the first time Victor pokes his head into the kitchen while Yuuri is soaking after a hard day’s training, her face lights up and she gestures for him to join her with a bright, “Come in, Vicchan!”  Yuuri’s mother seems determined to take Victor under her wing.  Victor has no complaints.  It’s been too long since he was mothered, and he didn’t realize he craved it until Hiroko is plying him with cups of matcha and warm soup, all bestowed with kind brushes to his shoulder or arm.  She communicates in a mixture of English, hand gestures and Japanese, and their conversations become a mix of charades and the American game Taboo, substituting words when vocabulary falls short until they understand each other. 

Yuuri’s ballet teacher, Minako, is the second most fluent person in English in Hasetsu, after Yuuri, and after their first real conversation the day Yuri—now dubbed Yurio—shows up, Victor takes to stopping by her bar in the evenings for a chat.  She tells him about her dance training, the tours she was a part of, and most importantly, about Yuuri.  Victor soaks up every story, hoping that they’ll help him understand the complex layers of the man he’s traveled across an ocean for.  Victor is aware of his own masks, but at least his are straightforward, simple, though carefully crafted to reflect what his audience desires.  Yuuri’s are more complicated, tangled thoughts that Victor can’t grasp long enough to pull apart. 

It’s after Yurio has vanished like the clearing of a summer storm, as Victor is helping the Nishigoris clean up Ice Castle, that he realizes the implications of Yuuri’s win. 

_He wants me to stay.  I said that I would coach him, but he actually_ wants _me to._  

It’s a beautiful thought.  He and Yuuri celebrate that night with a bowl of Katsudon (“Don’t worry about the diet, Yuuri—you can work it off on your run tomorrow!” “Victooor…!”) and he watches as Mari says something to Yuuri that makes him blush and smack her lightly on the arm.  That’s when it hits him:

_I’ll stay here for as long as he’ll let me._

This thought is followed immediately by:

_I wish I understood him. Not just his words, but the emotions behind his eyes, the way his fingers tap out rhythms like a nervous melody._

And then, a split second later:

_Why didn’t I think to learn Japanese before now?_

 

He orders a book that night, and it arrives three days later.  _Basic Japanese_ by Samuel E. Martin and Eriko Sato is thinner than he expected, and it got good reviews on Amazon.  He must not have read them thoroughly enough though; there is no list of Japanese characters in the book or in the index, and it seems as though the book expects him to already have knowledge of the Japanese writing system.  Frowning slightly (learning English had not been this complex, surely) he looks up a chart on his phone.

He almost drops the damn thing.

No one had ever bothered mentioning that the Japanese use no less than three separate writing systems, and that’s not counting the use of romaji, which is really just the Roman alphabet with a fancy name. 

First, he learns, there is hiragana, which is used for native words of Japanese origin and verb endings and particles and apparently whatever the hell it needs to be used for at any given time.  It has 71 symbols.

Then there’s katakana, which is used for imported words of non-Japanese origin.  Victor takes a moment to think of how awful it would have been learning French if he had to use a different alphabet for any word that connected to the English language. It looks only slightly different than hiragana, but it’s the difference between writing in cursive and writing in print for all that Victor can differentiate between the styles.  Honestly, they make the same sounds as the hiragana alphabet! There are another 71 of these too.

(None of these even count the combination characters!)

Last but not least, there is kanji, and this is where Victor almost abandons the idea of learning the language in this lifetime or any other.  Learning Hungarian would be easier. Kanji is not actually an alphabet at all, strictly speaking, but a series of symbols that each mean an entirely different word.  He’s never had to learn a vocabulary before he could learn basic grammar, but apparently these are the most common characters in the written language, and there are over 2,000 of them in common use.

Honestly, by comparison, learning English must have been a cakewalk for Yuuri.  He wonders if the Japanese are simply smarter than the rest of the world. 

But no, he’s started this now; he has the book to prove it.  He will finish it, see it through.  He’s Victor Nikiforov, for goodness’ sake!  (He wonders whether that’s ever really counted for much, deep down.)  Still, he didn’t win three Olympic medals by giving up at the first sign of a challenge.  He can learn this.  Yuuri would have learned it as a child, after all, and if a child can learn something, an adult can surely manage well enough.  Besides, he’ll just learn the most basic kanji and a bit of grammar, and surely he won’t need much more than that for day-to-day use.

 

(Here’s another secret about Victor: he’s never known how to do things by halves.)

 

He downloads an app called Duolingo.  It’s made for beginners, and it promises to teach him hiragana, which seems like a good first step.  It’s designed like a game, and it’s fun, even if the reminders to “keep up the great work” seem to grow increasingly threatening. He could swear that owl looks disappointed if he doesn’t get in at least 15 minutes a day.

But it doesn’t teach him grammar, and how can he put his own sentences together if they don’t teach him hard rules about basic word order?  After all, he can’t use phrases like “My dog sells hats” or “Are there six chairs in this room?” in his day-to-day life.  Still, it’s fast paced and fun, and the first time he recognizes a word from his new vocabulary while Hiroko is talking to him in her warm mish-mash of languages, he almost falls out of his chair. 

 

He picks up hiragana and katakana well enough, but kanji is clearly of the devil.  He can find no way to tell them apart or keep them memorized.

He purchases a new book called _Remembering the Kanji._

Opening the first page all but gives him a heart attack.

He wonders if he can get by without the kanji after all.

 

Victor has never considered himself stupid, though he’s played up to the media and other people’s expectations often enough if it meant getting his way.  Still, he knows what he’s worth.  He likes learning, likes walking away from something feeling like he knows more than he did before.

But he must be an idiot if even _Japanese for Dummies_ is beyond him. 

 

He wonders a little when this stopped being about learning enough to get by and became about understanding every aspect of Yuuri.  He understands a little better, now—that trip to the beach had been like running a marathon after too long spent walking, in terms of how far Victor feels they’ve come.  Yuuri lets him get a little closer every day.  A brush of a hand here, a bright, unguarded smile there, they all warm Victor in ways he couldn’t anticipate, and wasn’t that just delightful, being on the other end of a surprise after all this time?

But if Victor believes one thing, it’s that a language is an intimate reflection of the people who speak it.  English is composed more of slang than real words, it seems, and French has a verb for wandering the streets of a city with no intent to actually arrive at a particular destination.  Russian does not use article adjectives like ‘a,’ ‘an,’ or ‘the,’ as though the creators of the language simply found them so frivolous that they decided to remove them altogether in the interests of conciseness.  (He’s always loved the fact that they contrast this almost utilitarian grammar with a dozens of diminutives.)  So far, all that his studies of Japanese have taught him is that its people are complex, layered, and have excellent memories if their ability to keep track of all these characters is anything to go by.

But it’s one thing to know something and a different thing entirely to _understand_ it.  In English, these two verbs are often used as synonyms, but they possess a greater subtlety in French.  ‘Savoir’ (to know), its counterpart ‘connaître’ (to know a person), and ‘comprendre’ (to understand, internalize something and really _get it_ ; the English language borrowed it to create their word _comprehend_ ), all of these are separate words for a reason.

Victor no longer wants to _know_ Yuuri.  He wants to _comprehend_ him, in the original sense of the word. 

 

It’s the particles that get to him.  He could sort of grasp verb bases, relating it to the idea of the Russian noun case system, and honorifics were fine; the French are quite formal in their own way, this is simply formality carried to the next level.  

Perhaps it is the lack of sleep the night before, or the fact that Yuuri seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts and kept falling during practice, or the rising levels of _overwhelmed-ness_ as he sits on the floor of his room surrounded by flashcards and colored pens and sheets of paper that he no longer knows how to match up in any semblance of order.  He has a dictionary as thick as his arm to his left and three grammar books spread open on his right, and somewhere in the back of his mind he knows he ought to check his email because Victor’s—and by extension Yuuri’s—costume designer said she’d send pictures of the final design today. 

The door to his bedroom opens.  (He’s always so pleased to think of it as his bedroom, here; the Katsuki family stopped referring to it as a banquet room no more than a week after he moved in, another sign of how easily they seemed to have adopted him as one of their own, like he’d always lived here.)  Yuuri tip-toes in, as though uncertain he’s welcome (what a silly thought) and his eyes widen at the sight of the veritable ocean of papers surrounding Victor. 

“What are you doing?” he asks.  He’s grown far more direct lately, more open after two months of Victor’s constant company.  There’s formality still, in his tone, but he treats Victor as more friend than coach when he’s stepped off the ice.  

Victor smiles sheepishly.  “Studying?” he asks, a question rather than an actual answer. 

“Yes, I see that but what?”  Yuuri tilts his head so that the papers are less upside down for him.  “Is… is that Japanese?”

Victor shrugs, playing at aloofness.  “I figured I ought to learn, since I…” But here he trails off, looking up at Yuuri, who watches him back just as intently.

“Since you?”

“Since I’m staying,” Victor says.  He tells himself that there is nothing wrong with this statement, it’s obvious at this point, and he shouldn’t be in the least embarrassed.  But the way Yuuri’s breath catches slightly, the way his eyes widen just so, tells Victor that the words mean just as much to Yuuri as they do to him. 

“Oh,” he says simply.  “Yes, I suppose if, if you’re staying that would.  That would be useful.  If you’re staying, that is.”

“Plus, I’m finding that the more I learn about it, the more I want to understand it,” Victor continues, and a flush creeps over Yuuri’s face, starting at his nose and spreading outward.  It’s adorable. 

“Really?” he asks.  Victor nods, smile still hesitant, but no less genuine.  “Well, in that case,” Yuuri says shyly, “I’d be more than happy to help if you ever have questions.”

And oh.  Oh, that is a lovely idea, really.  Yuuri sitting close, mouth next to his ear, helping Victor in a way he only prays he is helping Yuuri on the ice. 

Why didn’t he think of it before?  Who better to explain the complexities of the Japanese language than a (ridiculously attractive, obviously brilliant, unfailingly patient) native speaker?

It’s been so long since Victor has actually _asked_ for help, but somehow Yuuri knows.

He understands.

“Actually, Yuuri,” begins Victor, gathering all the papers into a pile and scooting over slightly, “I do have a couple questions.”

“Oh, sure thing,” Yuuri says, stepping lightly over the floorboards to sit beside him.

“Alright, first things first,” says Victor, “why on earth do you have three writing systems and how do you remember them all?”

Yuuri laughs.

 

Their evening study sessions become Victor’s favorite part of the day. 

(Until after they kiss.  Then they become his second-favorite part of the day.)

 

One year later, Yuuri nudges Victor after they get off a Skype call with Yuuri’s parents in Hasetsu, so far from their (their!) apartment in St. Petersburg but so very close in spirit.

“You barely had to play charades with Mom or Dad,” he tells Victor, something like pride in his smile. Victor preens.

“I know, right?” he says.  “Come on, Yuuri—I have to introduce you to noun cases tonight!  Your Russian needs work, since you’re staying.”

Yuuri chuckles, light and sweet and real.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m staying.”

 

(They don’t make it to noun cases that evening.  It’s alright though; they have the rest of their lives to learn each other’s languages.)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> You came for Victuuri, you left with a grammar lesson. Hopefully you enjoyed it despite the jargon!
> 
> I love feedback more than cheesecake, and believe me when I say that means something. Don't be shy, let me know your thoughts, and thank you for reading!


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